When Sophie Allison sings, “I wanna be that cool,” you believe her. Coolness would be something to aspire to for a young indie rocker who records music under the decidedly uncool alias of Soccer Mommy. But the 20-year-old Allison, from Nashville, Tennessee, has something more valuable: humble relatability. Her hazy singing can be conversational and appealingly flat. She sounds like a person you might know.
In the summer of 2015, just after she had finished high school, Allison procured a Tascam four-track and collected her raw feelings—like an audio diary of teenaged heartbreak—onto Bandcamp releases with titles like songs for the recently sad and “moving to new york.” Still trading in piercing vulnerability, Clean is Allison’s excellent studio debut: a compact album of clear melodies, plainspoken lyrics, and the impossibly tangled logic of infatuation.
Clean has only subtle flourishes. Allison can be blunt like Liz Phair, or perceptive like early Taylor Swift, but she tells her stories of love and betrayal with a welcomed pop-punk brevity and kick. The melodrama of youth is rendered in sometimes uncomfortable detail—the seemingly innocuous memories that send you spiraling, like a particular way of brushing up against a person. In Clean’s songs, lovers become wolves; crushes linger with world-ending gravity; disaffected stoner girls become godly. Allison is caught between who she is and who she wants to be, singing such self-loathing lines as, “I am just a dying flower,” and, “Why would you still want to be with me?” But her dry voice itself deflects the anguish; it’s empowering.
Things happen on Clean that you wouldn’t expect. In the sad opener, “Still Clean,” Allison likens a greedy lover to a wild animal who literally eats her. It’s a twisted image, like a Grimm’s fairytale: “Left me drowning once you picked me out of your bloody teeth.” The pairing of lilting strums with such a savage lyric makes a statement: This soft music is not precious. It’s gnarly and intense, like the heart itself. When Allison sings that she “checked the window just to see if you’d come back to me,” it’s a crushing depiction of how easily obsession can lead to self-destruction. (Perhaps all this complication accounts for Allison’s simple desire, on “Skin,” to just “be the one you’re kissing when you’re stoned.”)
Over the breezy riff of “Cool,” Allison flips the script, romanticizing a rebel girl who’s equally vicious. She wants to be “Mary [with] a heart of coal,” a girl who treats boys like toys and gets high with her friends. The fiercer “Your Dog,” meanwhile, is not an interpolation of Iggy Pop but rather a total inversion: “I don’t wanna be your fucking dog,” Allison sings with fire. She conveys a sentiment about ownership that women have been shouting since they began picking up instruments without permission. Even when Allison’s strummy music evokes a coffee house open-mic, though, there’s an edge to it.
At the towering center of Clean is “Blossom (Wasting All My Time).” It is so spare as to be almost void-like: just Allison hovering six feet above her quietest strums, a mysticism perhaps learned from Leonard Cohen. When it starts, “Blossom” is so stinging that you might close your eyes. “Wasting all my time thinking about the way you treat me/Wasting all my time on someone who didn’t know me,” Allison sings, evoking a wrenching blues traditional. But the song cracks down the middle like a split locket, and halfway through, the bad feeling is replaced by an optimistic one. New longing replaces the old. And then life goes on.
If the album’s title brings to mind “Clean,” the pristine closing ballad from Swift’s 1989, you’d not be mistaken. Allison admits a devotion to Swift, and it shows in the sweetened ease and biting honesty of her music, in her knowing fixation on un-coolness. This comes into focus on Clean’s slow-burning “Scorpio Rising.” Allison is sitting in the car as the sun comes up with a boy who is going to leave her for another girl—one who’s “bubbly and sweet like a Coca-Cola.” She can’t let go: “You’re made from the stars/We watched from your car,” Allison sings as the song swirls. It’s the sound of knotted nascent love, a snapshot of a person with her messy thoughts. But in all its sonic clarity, Allison’s music contains the promise that these tragic scenarios could still be untangled. Clean is that much-cooler indie record Taylor once sung of. Below the surface, its spark gleams like a secret.
